Wireless Push-To-Talk (PTT) networks, are designed to facilitate communication among two or more users, and employ half-duplex communication. In such systems, a server is typically a centralized control point that grants a “floor” to a user who desires to speak to a respective talk group. Only one user may speak at one time. The user wishing to speak, pushes the talk button on a handset, gains the floor and speaks, while the other users may only listen during the interval.
There are possible use cases where a user may wish to transmit information, other than speech, for example a video file, live audio, streaming audio, still video, live video, streaming video, etc., or otherwise transmit a combination of media types to the talk group or to another user. Further, various applications, other than simply audio and video, that transmit data may make use of PTT functionality. Such systems may be referred to as “Push-to-X” (PTX) or “Push-to-multimedia” (PTM) systems.
Networks employing PTX capability may support a variety of mobile devices with various capabilities including older generation mobile devices that support some, but not all, of the various media types that could be utilized with PTX capabilities. The current systems and methods of floor control messaging do not enable participants in a PTX session to request and be granted the floor for combinations of media types, and do not provide notification of floor grants and availability to older generation mobiles that do not have all PTX capabilities. Therefore, compatibility difficulties arise for older mobile devices, which may be bandwidth limited, operating on networks with expanded PTX capability.
One possible solution is to establish multiple PTX sessions for a single user, in which each session, or each media stream, has an associated floor control messaging channel. This approach however, would be wasteful of resources and would neglect the problem of participating older generation mobiles that do not support all, or perhaps any, of the requested media streams requested by a newer model mobile station.
Therefore, a need exists for an improved floor control mechanism for PTX systems such that multimedia use cases may be better facilitated and older generation mobile stations may be supported.